Tweets

Goodreads

Contact Me

Don't feel like commenting? You can also find/contact me here:

Two things to keep in mind:
1. I am bad at answering lengthy emails. Sorry!
2. I may ask you for permission to blog about our correspondence. However, if you are harassing/abusive/trollish, then I no longer have to ask you for permission. Proceed with caution!

Month: November 2016

A lot of folks have been asking, “How do we protect our own emotional health without normalizing what’s going on?”

They’re speaking to the tension between being horrified, terrified, and disgusted by what’s happening and what’s about to happen politically, and yet still being able to get up in the morning and go to work or do whatever it is you do and function as if life is, well, normal.

To be honest, I don’t know. And to be honest, I really feel the temptation to just assimilate this into my model of the world and go on with my life as if it’s no big deal.

Of course, doing so is dangerous because it breeds complacency. If this is normal and no big deal, why fight against it? If it’s normal for our country’s leadership to casually throw around ideas like Muslim registries and internment camps, what can be done anyway? If swastikas all over everything is just a thing that happens now, why bother?

So we must retain our capacity for horror, even as it drags on year after year and threatens to feel less and less horrifying.

On the other hand, I also know this: no living thing is meant to live with unrelenting stress. Our stress response evolved to help us escape life-threatening but temporary situations. It spurs us to action that quickly burns through our reserves of energy but is meant to get us to a place where we can safely rest.

One of the ways in which mental illness can develop is that this physiological response is fired up constantly due to trauma, abuse, adverse life events, overly stressful jobs, and so on, to the point where we never have relief. It’s not meant to work that way, and depression and anxiety result.

That sort of constant stress can also lead to physical health problems, and it’s one reason (along with healthcare disparities and so on) why marginalized people tend to have worse health outcomes. The added stress of constant racism or other forms of bigotry takes both a physical and a psychological toll.

The reason so many of us are feeling such a strong urge to just accept our new political reality and move on isn’t just because activism is hard or because we’re lazy or whatever. It’s because, unfortunately for progressive politics, that’s actually the psychologically adaptive response. You’re not a bad person or a bad activist if it feels like your brain is urging you to move on.

This isn’t to shame anyone who can’t move on. Many people aren’t anywhere near feeling “normal” about this election because of preexisting trauma, mental illness, or any number of other factors that prevent them from “getting used to it.” That can make it even harder for them to go on with their lives, but that’s not their fault.

But if you are fighting the impulse to normalize, know that you’re to some extent fighting with biology. That doesn’t make you wrong and biology right–we fight and control our instincts all the time, often for our (and others’) greater good. That just means that you shouldn’t blame yourself if it’s hard and you sometimes fail.

As I said, I’m not sure where I’m at with this myself. I’m still very much in the place I was in my previous post, and I’m still dedicated to giving myself space to move through my own feelings rather than shoving them aside for others’ sake. The thing is, if I don’t normalize at all, I’m going to burn out. And not only is that horrible for me, and for all the friends and family and partners who depend on me, and for my parents who cosigned on my $160,000 of student loans and will have to pay them if I become too depressed to work, and for my clients who depend on me to provide them with mental healthcare–it will also be ultimately bad for any sort of activism or organizing that I was supposed to be involved in, because then I won’t be doing it at all.

And if I were going to give any actual advice in this post, it would be this: be on guard for the possibility of burnout, and know that you owe it to yourself to do what you need to do to protect your own health. And the people who depend on you need you in good health, too. But more importantly, so do you.

The struggle against normalization also belies the fact that, unfortunately, what’s happening right now actually is kind of normal on a global and historical scale. It may be relatively abnormal in the United States, but many people have already lived through it. The fact that I was raised by such people might by why I’m simultaneously so triggered and so resilient–triggered because unlike them, I don’t yet have the confidence that I can survive it, but resilient because I’ve learned some of their coping skills. No matter how bad things get, my parents spend time with their loved ones, do “silly” things like watch bad crime shows to relax, invest in their work, take care of their health, and do things they enjoy. Oppressive governments are entirely normalized to them, and they survive. To some extent, they’ve passed that down to me. It’s hard for me not to feel like this is just the way of things.

That said, we don’t have to conflate normalization with acceptance. That swastikas and casual references to mass internment may be normal here right now doesn’t mean we have to let them remain normal forever. We can’t let them remain normal forever.

That means that we may have to look beyond emotional reactions to motivate our activism. If your main motivator is the anger you feel when you witness bigotry or when Trump opens his mouth (so, when you witness bigotry), you may stop acting when the anger stops coming. And for many of us, it will, because our brains can’t sustain that level of emotional response for four-plus years.

Since I’ve never really been motivated by negative emotions–for me it’s more about the satisfaction of doing something that I think is meaningful and effective–I’m not actually that concerned that I’ll stop doing things once the pain of this election outcome stops feeling so raw. Actually, I’ll probably be doing more things because I won’t be so fucking overwhelmed with despair.

And if you think about it, many of the things we fight against–racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on–have always seemed “normal” to us because we grew up steeped in them. That didn’t stop us from fighting. The threat we face now is of a different type and a different degree, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t feel both normal and unacceptable at the same time.

Something I’m going to try to do to maintain both my sanity and my outrage is to set aside times for doing political things and times where I’m going to keep political things out of my head and out of the conversation. Sometimes I’ll sit down for an hour or two to read the news and write a letter to my representative and feel angry and worked up during that time, but then I need other times where I am free to not think about that stuff at all, to not give a fuck about it. Not everyone is able to achieve that sort of compartmentalization–it’s something that comes easy to me after a lifetime of necessity–but if you can, it might help you.

So I suppose my final answer to the question I opened with is that, for the most part, you cannot maintain your mental health without doing some amount of normalizing, or whatever else it takes to gradually reduce your stress response so that you can function rather than sobbing for days on end like I did right after the election.

But it matters how you normalize–what language you use, and what you do in response. “Trump’s not that bad I guess” combined with no action is disastrous if enough people adopt it; “It is currently normal in our country to advocate mass internment and I must act against it” would be a very beneficial attitude for people to take, even though it doesn’t necessarily involve getting your blood pressure up at each mention of mass internment.

Unfortunately, the people who most need to resist their urge to accept this are the people least likely to be reading this article or worrying about normalizing horrible things to begin with. If you’re worried that this will become normal to you and you’ll stop caring, I’d predict that you probably won’t stop caring. But, of course, you know yourself best.

And again, if you cannot normalize, you don’t have to, and I hope you can find a way to be okay without it. But if you can, that’s not a personal failure; that’s your brain trying to protect you. You don’t have to let it, but you’re also allowed to put your own oxygen mask on first.

As the days went by and nothing anyone said could comfort me, I realized I would have to comfort myself.

This is what I would’ve liked to hear in the days following the election. To that end, it’s extremely personal even though it discusses a political event. It may not be true, but it can’t really be said to be false, either, because this is what keeps me wanting to keep living. I hope that by writing it and putting it out into the world, as a real, living, breathing thing, I can be comforted.

There’s a saying I kind of live by, and it goes: “Things will neither be as good as you hope, nor as bad as you fear.” I don’t remember where I first heard it or who I could possibly credit it to. I like it because it reminds me not to overinvest myself in fantastical possibilities, positive or negative.

I’ve had plenty of each this past week. First I thought it was literally just a mistake. A part of me expected to wake up on Wednesday morning–I didn’t stay up quite late enough to see the actual concession–and check my phone and see that Clinton won. Things were obviously not as good as that particular hope.

Then I hoped even more irrationally that Someone Would Do Something–what?–and reverse the election results. Can’t anyone do something? Isn’t he literally currently on trial for child rape? But no, nobody was going to do something; the time for doing something was November 8 and we did not do it.

Now I hope for other too-good things. That it was all just a big funny troll and he’ll turn out to be a liberal. That he’ll at least leave the ACA and abortion rights and LGBTQ rights and a ton of other things alone and focus on his money. That he’ll die or resign or be impeached and then so will Pence and literally everyone else on down until I don’t know what. That it’ll be like Harry Potter or Star Wars or other great stories that I love in which the rebels win in the end and not all that many people die.

And then there were the fears. As soon as the election was over I discovered in myself a seemingly unstoppable well of intergenerational trauma that paralyzed me with visions of forced labor camps, gas chambers, Secret Police, interrogations, mass graves, yellow stars on clothing, armed men kicking down the door in the middle of the night. While there are many valid reasons to fear that Trump will inexorably damage our democracy, these particular fears are not, I don’t think, coming from any actual evidence. They are an inevitable result of trauma, even trauma that you haven’t personally witnessed. They are a part of my story nonetheless.

Some won’t survive Trump. Of those that do, many will probably be changed in ways they never wanted to change, ways that you can’t necessarily turn into silver linings. There’s no point papering over that ugly writing on the wall.

You may not survive Trump. Your loved ones may not survive Trump. I’m so sorry we didn’t do better by you. We failed in many ways not just on November 8 but in the weeks and months leading up to it, but many people are already doing that postmortem analysis and that’s not my aim here.

It is a small but significant comfort, though, that human ingenuity and empathy will survive, and most likely so will our democracy, and that for every Trump there are dozens of people who enrich the lives of the people around them. If only our political system were set up to uplift these people. But it’s not, so instead it’s up to us to uplift them, now more than ever.

III. Privilege

As someone who has often written about privilege as a helpful lens through which to understand our society, I was surprised to find that in the days after the election, personally, I found this lens unhelpful and even harmful.

Just to get this out of the way first–I don’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about privilege right now. We should be talking about it more than ever. I mean that in my own emotional process, it didn’t help at all.

Something that I kept hearing a lot was that certain people have “nothing to worry about” in the coming years and are therefore obligated to put themselves on the line for others. I guess I don’t think anyone is ever “obligated” to do anything but treat others like human beings, but aside from that, I don’t know who I could possibly identify that I personally know (so, not a member of Trump’s family or cabinet) who has “nothing to worry about.”

A straight cis white man who loses health insurance because the ACA is repealed and then develops a fatal condition is just as dead as anyone else. Does he have “nothing to worry about”?

When climate change continues unabated thanks to Trump’s denialism and all of us suffer, do any of us have “nothing to worry about”?

And I think back to those horrible images I keep seeing, and I think about who had “nothing to worry about” then. In the Soviet Union, being straight, cis, white, and male may have afforded you some amount of protection–I’m not sure exactly what the social dynamics there were–but if someone informed on you (usually falsely, usually in order to save themselves or their family or to get back at you or to get something you had), off you go to the camps like anyone else.

Some people are in more danger than others, and we must speak up and stand up for those people. But I’m tired of the gaslighty claims that relatively privileged people are wrong in their own fears. None of us are actually safe now.

I’m also not sure where I stand in this hypothetical privilege ladder now that white supremacists are in power, because Jews are not white to them. Jewish whiteness has always been somewhat conditional, not just on time but also on place. There are many parts of the country–the types of parts that voted heavily for Trump, in fact–where Jews have never been white. My family fled a country where Jews were not white. Anti-Semitism has always trafficked in racial stereotypes. All of you who claim that Jewishness is just a religion and nothing more must not have ever heard all the jokes about big ugly noses and frizzy ugly hair, and inferior genes and physical weakness and illness. There’s a long legacy of visual representations to that effect, too.

So, in the context of that and in the context of swastikas getting spray-painted all over everything and in the context of this has happened to us numerous times already, I don’t really appreciate being told that I have “nothing to worry about.”

IV. Organizing

So what now? Now, apparently, we’re supposed to “organize.”

“Don’t mourn, organize,” say actual posts on my actual Facebook feed, as if anyone has the fucking right to tell me how to feel right now.

I’m aware that immediately jumping to action is some people’s coping strategy, and I don’t knock that. But the proliferation of these posts within hours of the election’s conclusion was, if not exactly triggering, at the very least deeply invalidating. I feel like I’m grieving the loss of a loved one as people stand around and command me to “take action” and “use your privilege” and “do something about it.” What am I supposed to do? It’s dead. You want me to bring a corpse back to life now? No amount of privilege is going to make that happen.

Which brings me to the deeper part of this, which is that I don’t feel like I can trust anyone enough to organize with them.

I know this will upset some of you to hear, but this is the part that I feel like I have to say before anything else can come out of my chest. Progressives who voted third party in swing states (or didn’t vote at all) because Clinton wasn’t progressive enough make me feel like a hostage in a negotiation. “Give me a better Democratic candidate, or the girl gets it.” Well, they called your bluff, I’m shot and bleeding, and none of us are better off for it. Most of these progressives are white and non-Jewish; some aren’t, but even those are responsible for bargaining with others’ lives as if those lives are theirs to bargain with.

Now I am being told to “organize” with my fellow progressives because this is the only way to stop Trump. Leaving aside the fact that the only realistic way to stop Trump given the conditions we had was to vote for Clinton, I wouldn’t organize so much as a desk drawer with people who so cavalierly threw me and all other marginalized people onto the negotiating table.

I’m aware that third-party voters and nonvoters don’t see it that way. You see it as a matter of conscience, of standing up for what’s right. That may be true for you, but I feel that my life, health, and safety have been put on the line without my consent and I can’t trust people who do that to me.

Maybe eventually I’ll come around and forgive and stop feeling so unsafe and compromised, but for now, just leave me alone to write and call my representative in peace. I don’t want to organize anything besides my Thanksgiving party.

V. Grief

The past week has definitely felt like grieving. I experienced that odd narrowing of focus, that sense that literally nothing else matters, not even the things I cared deeply about before. I remember looking at photos of my outfit from election night and feeling sort of numbly confused as to why I would care about putting together an outfit. I can still barely write anything that isn’t this, because I don’t see why anything else would matter.

I’m grieving for a future that isn’t one of various shades of total fucking shitshow. I’m grieving for all the people who will get hurt. I’m grieving for the fact that there will probably not be a female president in my lifetime; after this we will assume that a woman couldn’t possibly win an election even against an incompetent, impulsive, hateful rapist and fraud. I’m grieving for the hope I had felt about my own future. I’m grieving for my parents and all the other survivors of authoritarian and fascist regimes who came here thinking they would never have to go through that again. I’m grieving, utterly bizarrely and misplacedly, for Hillary Clinton and the hope that she must’ve had that the world was finally ready for her, and it wasn’t. I’m even grieving, against all reason, for the people who thought this would save them and who might never realize just how much it’s going to destroy them.

I am grieving and I feel too numb to care, too apathetic to organize, too betrayed to trust, and too overwhelmed to move forward.

I’m told, if not in these exact words, that that’s a personal failure because it means I’m wallowing in my own feelings rather than Organizing or whatever. Look–first of all, I don’t owe anyone shit. The way I see it right now, my family came to this country because y’all told us this can’t happen here, so as it turns out, you lied. You broke it, you pay for it.

But that’s my immediate, raging, grieving self. That’s the sort of thing I have to move past in order to be of any use to myself or anyone else. And I can’t move past it without taking the time and space to move through it.

When I moved to New York–and again when I moved back from New York–I had a really, really hard time with those transitions. Those were radically different sorts of events than this is–for one, they were not literally national-scale disasters and for another, I got to fucking choose those things. But what I learned was that as silly and petty and childish as my feelings seemed to me, I needed to be gentle and caring with myself in order to be able to move forward.

I think that applies to this as much as it does to any other grief I will ever experience, and for that reason I feel absolutely zero guilt for indulging those feelings for now and just letting myself feel them all the way through. There’s no moral value to this because it’s simply what needs to be done.

I am grieving, but the final stage of this grieving process isn’t acceptance. It’s anger.

If you voted for Trump today, I will continue to treat you with the basic respect and dignity that I believe all human beings deserve, even if you don’t believe the same.

I won’t call you names or weaponize your marginalizations against you–and yes, plenty of Trump voters have them, despite the fact that he hates people like you.

I will continue to fight for your rights whenever I see them eroded or denied, even though you left mine lying in the gutter.

I will seek to understand your experiences and motivations, just like I do everyone else’s, because I’m curious about people and also because that’s how I’m going to keep the rest of us safe from your hatred.

If you come to me as a client for counseling, I will provide you with the same ethical, evidence-based, compassionate care I give everyone else who walks into my office, even though you voted to destroy the programs that fund these life-saving services for yourself and everyone else.

If I have to interact with you at a party or a checkout line, I’ll do it politely. There’s no point in adding even more misery to the world.

Now that that’s clear, here’s what I won’t do.

I won’t go back to not knowing that you–every single one of you with the yard signs and bumper stickers and baseball caps–voted for someone who, if given a chance, would sexually assault me. I’m not going to just pretend you didn’t look at that man’s name on your ballot and, having seen those headlines splashed all over your social media, went ahead and selected it.

If I loved you before, I will not–I cannot–continue to love you now, no matter how many tacky posts I see on Facebook about “loving each other no matter what happens today.” I don’t make a habit of loving people who love hatred. If you wanted my love, you should’ve valued it enough not to love someone who sees me as a piece of meat.

I will not tolerate intolerance. I won’t see you as monsters or animals, but I will see you as exactly what you are–human beings who are to various extents comfortable with or actively supportive of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, xenophobia, and other forms of harmful biased thinking. Even if you were uncomfortable with some of it, you were not uncomfortable enough to refrain from voting for the most openly bigoted presidential candidate in modern history. Nobody forced you to do that.

I will not “forgive.” Forgiveness is for people who have acknowledged the harm they’ve done, apologized sincerely, and done what they can to repair the damage. Our culture of obligatory forgiveness is bullshit, and “forgiving” people who haven’t changed a single thing about themselves is just another way to say that we’ll smile and pretend their actions have no consequences and insulate them from those consequences. I fucking refuse. I will forgive any Trump voter only if and when they understand they were wrong, apologize, and commit themselves to working to undo what they helped unleash.

Because even if Trump loses tonight, even if he loses by a historical landslide, the damage is done, and those millions of us that he and his supporters have directly targeted will not forget. The acts of violence he has inspired still happened, and people are still hurting from them.

PASSIVE COMMUNICATION is a style in which individuals have developed a pattern of avoiding expressing their opinions or feelings, protecting their rights, and identifying and meeting their needs. As a result, passive individuals do not respond overtly to hurtful or anger-inducing situations. Instead, they allow grievances and annoyances to mount, usually unaware of the buildup. But once they have reached their high tolerance threshold for unacceptable behavior, they are prone to explosive outbursts, which are usually out of proportion to the triggering incident. After the outburst, however, they may feel shame, guilt, and confusion, so they return to being passive.

In their book on polyamory, More Than Two, Eve Rickert and Franklin Veaux define passive communication this way:

Passive communication refers to communicating through subtext, avoiding direct statements, and looking for hidden meanings. Passive communicators may use techniques such as asking questions or making vague, indirect statements in place of stating needs, preferences or boundaries. Directly asking for what you want creates vulnerability, and passive communication often comes from a desire to avoid this vulnerability. Passive communication also offers plausible deniability; if we state a desire for something indirectly, and we don’t get it, it’s easy to claim we didn’t really want it. Stating our needs means standing up for them and taking the risk that others may not agree to meet them.

Although I understand that cultural/social/familial norms differ, I’m strongly against passive communication, Guess Culture, and anything else in that vein in my personal life. (My opinion is that those things are often harmful to others too, and much of this blog is based on that opinion, but that’s up to you.) I come from a family and a culture that thrives on Guess Culture, so I’m not coming at this from some hyper-individualistic American perspective. My perspective is that I’ve seen firsthand the harm this communication style does and I refuse to participate in it anymore.

But refusing to participate is complicated for two reasons. One is that when you’re raised with something like this, you’re inevitably going to fall back into it, especially when you’re hurt, angry, or otherwise not firing on all mental cylinders. That’s compounded by the fact that I’m still very close with my family, which means that I have to communicate the way they do when I’m with them. The result is that I get plenty of practice at communicating passively, even though I try to be more direct with my family than I used to be.

The second reason is that other people use passive communication too, and it’s not always practical, possible, or desirable to just cut all those people out of your life. Sure, I find some people toxically passive-aggressive and avoid having anything to do with them, but most of the people I encounter who communicate passively are, like me, just trying to get themselves out of that mindset and they’re going to slip up from time to time. To me, that’s not something to dump a friend or partner over.

So, when I sense that someone is upset with me because they’re dropping little hints but won’t say anything directly, or when I tell someone about my weekend plans and they sigh and wistfully say, “That sounds so fun, I wish I had someone to do that with…”, I honestly don’t really know what to do. Ignoring the subtext seems like a jerk move, but taking the bait teaches the person that this is an effective (and acceptable) way to communicate with me. All that does is set up a situation where they never feel like they have to actually state their feelings and desires directly, and when I have to constantly read between someone’s lines like that, I will eventually fuck up, and they will be upset and resentful that I didn’t magically know what they felt or wanted.

You might think I’m exaggerating–what’s the big deal with inviting someone along to do Thing because they seem sad that they don’t have anyone to do Thing with?–but in my experience, passive communicators don’t choose just one thing to communicate passively about. Furthermore, it traps me into communicating passively, too, because being direct with passive communicators often backfires. When I was younger, I used to ask people things like, “Are you asking to be invited?” or “Are you saying you have a crush on me?”, only to be met with angry denials and dismissal.

As it turns out, many passive communicators seem to wish people could read their minds right up until they actually do. Instead, you end up swept up into that sort of game-playing right along with them. Most of our popular cultural scripts around sex and romance rely on this–you can never come right out and say that you like someone, and you can’t ask them if they like you, either.

Some passive communicators are hoping that you’ll ask them, though. The typical example is someone who silently huffs until you ask them why they’re upset. Then they’ll insist that it’s “nothing” and you have to keep asking until they finally unleash a whole list of things you’ve been doing for weeks or months that upset them and you had no idea. (Although the sexist stereotype is that this is a “female” thing to do, I assure you, it’s quite gender-neutral.)

It can feel like a jerk move to ignore the fact that someone seems to be upset at you, and it can seem like a very small deal to ask them if you’ve upset them. The problem is that when this becomes a pattern–and with people who habitually communicate in a passive way, it will–it creates a very unequal burden of emotional labor. Rather than just being responsible for listening to them, respecting their boundaries, owning your mistakes, and communicating your own needs and feelings, you are now also responsible for laboriously extracting theirs from them like a dentist performing a root canal.

Some people are totally fine with that dynamic. I, however, am not.

(Some people who are totally fine with that dynamic later realize they’re completely overwhelmed by the disproportionate emotional labor, but that’s a separate article.)

But there are times when being receptive to passive communication is an ethical imperative, and that’s when it comes to setting boundaries.

Because of the way that most women and many people of other genders are socialized, many of them end up uncomfortable or even unable to state boundaries directly. It’s a skill we have to relearn as adults. (I say “relearn” because most little children have no trouble with this. It’s only as they get older that they learn that saying “no” is somehow wrong.) That’s why “no means no” was insufficient as a sexual assault prevention slogan–many people don’t say “no” directly. Instead, they communicate their “no” passively–through silence, closed-off body language, uncertainty, and all sorts of other signals that are definitely not meant to communicate a “yes.”

In my personal life, I prefer to interact with people who are able to tell me directly when they want me to stop doing something or when something isn’t working for them, because for me that’s a major part of trust and intimacy. But if someone communicates a boundary indirectly, I respect it anyway–possibly checking in about it later, if appropriate, so that I can make sure I understood correctly and didn’t cross any other boundaries.

So if I ask someone if they want to have sex (to be frank, this almost never happens, but let’s pretend it does for the sake of example), and they say, “Well, I don’t know…I have to get up early tomorrow…” I just go ahead and consider that a “no,” even though it’s technically a passive way of communicating “no.”

That’s an easy call because I consider boundaries so important. But with anything other than that, I just don’t think the excess emotional labor is justified.

Refusing to read double and triple meanings into people’s words is also a way of pushing back against my own upbringing. Because, yeah, I’m really tempted to do it. My parents taught me to do it, not just by example but through direct teaching (“Maybe she said that because she’s secretly upset that you didn’t invite her to your birthday party.”). I’m also really good at it, which is both a blessing and a curse. (As I said, people rarely like it when they realize how well they’ve been understood when what they really wanted was to obfuscate.) So at some point I have to say enough and just opt out.

I also hope that it encourages people to be direct with me. The ones who can’t do that decide that I’m oblivious, selfish, or both and fade out of my life; the ones who decide that they want what they want from me badly enough to ask for it directly, ask for it directly.

Any discussion of passive communication and its nasty cousin, passive-aggressiveness, inevitably elicits rationalizations and justifications for this kind of behavior. Maybe that’s what they learned growing up. Maybe they were abused and this is their way of coping. Maybe they don’t think their desires are valid so they feel too ashamed to ask for them directly. Maybe they have social anxiety and can’t bear rejection. Maybe they can’t trust me enough to risk being direct.

Look, I’ve been through a lot of that and I get it. But just because a particular behavior once made sense as a response to a particular environment doesn’t mean it’s still adaptive or reasonable. And it definitely doesn’t mean I’m obligated to do harm to myself in order to accommodate it. Maybe if you trust me so little that you can’t be direct with me, then we have no business being friends or partners.

Passive communication doesn’t work for me. Except for boundaries, which I will always go far out of my way to perceive and respect, this is not a communication style that I can sustainably use (or have used with me).

I’m genuinely sorry if that makes anyone feel like they can’t interact with me, but not sorry enough to ever go back to being a passive communicator.